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356. Coffee with Jesus

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   David Wilkie

Genre:  Fiction, Graphic Novel, Theology

118 pages, published November 1, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The graphic novel Coffee with Jesus is taken from a daily online comic strip born out of artist David Wilkie’s frustration with the polarized political climate in America.  The strip is organized around six themes:  getting to know Jesus, spiritual disciplines, relationships, culture, church, and the challenges of life.

Quotes 

 

My Take

I was first made aware of Coffee with Jesus when my church used it for several weeks as a launch pad for sermons.  There is a lot of insight and relevant commentary in this short book told in a new and creative format.  Many of the strips really got me thinking.

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350. It’s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Lenna Kotke

Author:   Gregg Easterbrook

Genre:  Sociology, Economics, Public Policy, Politics, Science

352 pages, published February 20, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In It’s Better Than It Looks, author Gregg Easterbrook surveys a number of different metrics to see how well the world is doing and makes a convincing case that things are much better than most people think.  Under every meaningful measure, the modern world is better than it ever has ever been.  In the United States, disease, crime, discrimination, and most forms of pollution are in long-term decline, while longevity and education keep rising and economic indicators are better than in any past generation. Worldwide, malnutrition and extreme poverty are at historic lows, and the risk of dying by war or violence is the lowest in human history.

Quotes 

 

My Take

As a naturally optimistic and grateful person, It’s Better Than It Looks is my kind of book.  It is a clear-eyed look at how humanity is actually faring in the 21st century and the answer is amazingly well.  When you think about the fact that 70 to 80 million people died during World War II alone, you have a much better appreciation for how much things have improved worldwide in the past 70 years.  It’s Better Than It Looks reminded a lot of Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, another worthy read on this same topic.

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349. An American Marriage

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tayari Jones

Genre:  Fiction

308 pages, published February 6, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

African American newlyweds Celestial and Roy, an aspiring artist and a young executive, are living the American Dream in Atlanta when Roy is wrongly accused and convicted of rape.  How they navigate the ensuing years is the subject of this book.

Quotes 

“But home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch. You can’t pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.”

 

“There should be a word for this, the way it feels to steal something that’s already yours.”

 

“A woman doesn’t always have a choice, not in a meaningful way. Sometimes there is a debt that must be paid, a comfort that she is obliged to provide, a safe passage that must be secured. Everyone of us has lain down for a reason that was not love.”

 

“There are too many loose ends in the world in need of knots.”     

 

“I’m alone in a way that’s more than the fact that I am the only living person within these walls. Up until now, I thought I knew what was and wasn’t possible. Maybe that’s what innocence is, having no way to predict the pain of the future. When something happens that eclipses the imaginable, it changes a person. It’s like the difference between a raw egg and a scrambled egg. It’s the same thing, but it’s not the same at all. That’s the best way I can put it. I look in the mirror and I know it’s me, but I can’t quite recognize myself.”

 

“Marriage is between two people. There is no studio audience.”

 

“I thought of Walter again. “Six or twelve,” he sometimes said when he was depressed, which wasn’t all the time but often enough that I recognized a blue mood when it was settling in. “That’s your fate as a black man. Carried by six or judged by twelve.”

 

“Much of life is timing and circumstance, I see that now.”

 

“I have always let you know how much I care, right? You never had to wonder. I’m not a man for words. Daddy showed me that you ‘do’ for a woman. Remember that time when you damn near had a nervous breakdown because it looked like the hickory-nut tree in the front yard was thinking about dying? Where I’m from, we don’t believe in spending money on pets, let alone trees. But I couldn’t bear to see you fret, so I hired a tree doctor. See, in my mind, that was a love letter.”

 

“Sometimes when you like where you end up, you don’t care how you got there.”

 

“You can never really unlove somebody. Maybe it changes shape, but it’s there.”

 

“Sometimes it’s exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I’ve lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn’t kill me then and will not kill me now. But this what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again.” 

My Take

Tayari Jones is a gifted writer and I appreciated the insight that she provided into the lives of people who are typically outside my social circles.  After reading An American Marriage, I felt that I had a better understanding of the African American communities and the issues that they have to contend with, especially African American men.  I was also impressed with the understanding Jones conveys of how a marriage works or doesn’t work.

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347. The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Nick Reader

Author:   Ben Shapiro

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, Philosophy, Theology

288 pages, published March 19, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Right Side of History is Ben Shapiro’s take on the history of religion and philosophy in Western Civilization and how those two things were integral to America becoming a great and unique country.  However, he argues that we are in the midst of a crisis of purpose and ideas.  Our freedoms are built upon the two ideas that every human being is made in God’s image and that human beings were created with reason capable of exploring God’s world.  These precepts led to the birth of science, human rights, prosperity, peace, and artistic beauty.  They also built America, ended slavery, defeated the Nazis and the Communists, lifted billions from poverty and gave billions spiritual purpose. Civilizations that rejected these ideas have collapsed into ignominy.  The USSR, Maoist China, Nazi Germany and modern day Venezuela rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, substituting a new utopian vision of “social justice.”  The result was mass starvation and slaughter of tens of millions of human beings.  Shapiro warns that the United States is in the process of abandoning Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, favoring instead moral subjectivism and the rule of passion.  The result if civilization collapse into tribalism, individualistic hedonism, and moral subjectivism.  The solution is to regain the moral purpose that drives us to be better individuals and assume the duty of working together for the greater good.

Quotes 

“We don’t live in a perfect world, but we do live in the best world that has ever existed.”

 

“What does this mean for human beings? What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too. What is our telos? Our end, according to both Plato and Aristotle, is to reason, judge, and deliberate.”

 

“The best countries—and the best societies—are those where citizens are virtuous enough to sacrifice for the common good but unwilling to be forced to sacrifice for the “greater” good. Flourishing societies require a functional social fabric, created by citizens working together—and yes, separately—toward a meaningful life.”

 

“Lasting happiness can only be achieved through cultivation of soul and mind. And cultivating our souls and minds requires us to live with moral purpose.”

 

“The creation story itself is designed to demonstrate how the first man, Adam, used his innate power of choice wrongly—and we are all Adam’s descendants.”

 

“What does this mean for human beings? What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too. What is our telos? Our end, according to both Plato and Aristotle, is to reason, judge, and deliberate.”

 

”a society of essential oils and self-esteem has replaced a society of logic.”

 

“That virtue took the form of courage—willingness to sacrifice life, fortune, and sacred honor in pursuit of defending the rights necessary to pursue virtue itself. That virtue took the form of temperance—no better founding document has ever been penned than the Constitution of the United States, the product of compromise. That virtue took the form of prudence—the practical wisdom of The Federalist Papers has not yet been surpassed in political thought. And that virtue took the form of justice—the rule of law, not of men, and the creation of a system where each receives his due.”

 

“Nazism didn’t arise from consumerism. It arose from communal purpose overriding individual purpose, and individual capacity abandoned in favor of worship of the communal capacity of the state. Nazism, in other words, lay a lot closer to Marxism than capitalism did.”

 

“Politics is about working to build the framework for the pursuit of happiness, not the achievement of it; politics helps us establish the preconditions necessary for happiness, but can’t provide happiness in and of itself.”

 

“Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

 

“Christianity’s focus on grace rather than works makes it a far more accessible religion than Judaism in a practical sense. The commandments of Judaism are intricate and difficult. Christianity dispensed with the need for them. Faith is paramount.”

 

“We receive our notions of Divine meaning from a three-millennia-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Jews; we receive our notions of reason from a twenty-five-hundred-year-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Greeks. In rejecting those lineages—in seeking to graft ourselves to rootless philosophical movements of the moment, cutting ourselves off from our own roots—we have damned ourselves to an existential wandering.”

 

“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society,” Rousseau wrote. 

My Take

The Right Side of History was a Mother’s Day gift from my son Nick, a devotee of Ben Shapiro.  Nick and I share a conservative/libertarian philosophy and I was looking forward to reading Shapiro’s take on Western Civilization.  While the book is a bit dense at times with its lengthy history of philosophy, I wholeheartedly agreed with Shapiro’s conclusions and prescriptions for keeping America from plunging into the historical abyss and towards a free society that recognizes and values the individual while still expecting that individual to work within his or her community to improve the lives of others.  An interesting and worthwhile read.

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346. The King’s Curse

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Phillipa Gregory

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

592 pages, published August 14, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The King’s Curse is the final novel in the Cousins’ War series by renowned historical fiction author Phillipa Gregory.  It tells the fascinating story of the ups and downs of noble woman Margaret Pole, a lady-in-waiting to Katherine of Aragon and cousin of Elizabeth of York (the White Princess).  Margaret had a unique vantage point to witness the rise to power and eventual corruption of Henry VIII, one of history’s great monsters who was cursed to never produce a male heir.

Quotes 

“Thomas More once told me: lion or king, never show fear or you are a dead man.”

 

“A single man’s imperfect conscience can never be superior to centuries of tradition.”

 

“Life is a risk, who knows this better than me? Who knows more surely that babies die easily, that children fall ill from the least cause, that royal blood is fatally weak, that death walks behind my family like a faithful black hound?”

 

“But Elizabeth and I are accustomed to loss, we are Plantagenets—we dine on a diet of betrayal and heartbreak.”

 

“He was such a happy boy, and happiness is not memorable.” 

My Take

I’m a big fan of Philippa Gregory, the prolific writer of historical fiction in Britain.  Since starting my reading quest, I’ve read and enjoyed the following books by Gregory:  The Queen’s Fool, The Taming of the Queen, The Kingmaker’s Daughter, and The Last Tudor.  The King’s Curse did not disappoint.  Gregory makes you feel a part of history, delving into the lives, motivations, hopes and fears of historical figures that brings them and that part of history to life.  I have always had a particular interest in 14th and 15th Century British history and increased my understanding of the players and times of that era after reading The King’s Curse.

 

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340. Miracle Creek

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Drue Emerson

Author:   Angie Kim

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime

357 pages, published April 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Miracle Creek is a literary courtroom drama about a Korean immigrant family and a young, single mother accused of murdering her eight-year-old autistic son.  It takes place in a small Virginia town and explores the intertwining lives of people who are very different from each other.  All is not what it seems as the courtroom tension builds.

Quotes 

“But that was the way life worked. Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together — one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off, and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad–every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness–resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.”

 

“to Americans, verbiage was an inherent good, akin to kindness or courage. They loved words—the more, the longer, and more quickly said, the smarter and more impressive.” 

My Take

In Miracle Creek, author Angie Kim combines compelling character studies with a taut courtroom drama.  You also come away from the book with a deeper understanding of the highs and lows of living with an autistic child.  A page turner of the best kind.

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339. The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Maxwell King

Genre:  Non Fiction, Biography, Psychology

416 pages, published September 4, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Good Neighbor is a biography of an American original, Fred Rogers (1928–2003), known and beloved by millions of children as Mr. Rogers.   In addition to creating his iconic children’s show, Fred was intensely devoted to children and their needs for understanding, compassion, equality, and kindness. Using original interviews, oral histories, and archival documents, author Maxwell King traces Rogers’s personal, professional, and artistic life through decades of work.

Quotes 

“You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.”

 

“Mister Rogers speaks directly into the camera to the little children who are quietly, intently watching: “It helps to say that you’re sad. Often it even helps to cry . . . let people know how you feel.” This is Rogers’s signature message: feelings are all right, whatever is mentionable is manageable, however confusing and scary life may become. Even with death and loss and pain, it’s okay to feel all of it, and then go on.”

 

“You don’t set out to be rich and famous; you set out to be helpful.”

 

“In a now-famous Rogers dictum, delivered in speeches and in his books, he advises adults: “Please, think of the children first. If you ever have anything to do with their entertainment, their food, their toys, their custody, their day care, their health, their education – please listen to the children, learn about them, learn from them.”

 

“The directions weren’t written in invisible ink on the back of my diploma. They came ever so slowly for me; and ever so firmly I trusted that they would emerge. All I can say is, it’s worth the struggle to discover who you really are.”

 

“Our job in life,” he said at a graduation ceremony at Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania, early in his career, in 1969, “is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is—that each of us has something that no one else has—or ever will have—something inside which is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness, and to provide ways of developing its expression.”

 

“Fred Rogers never—ever—let the urgency of work or life impede his focus on what he saw as basic human values: integrity, respect, responsibility, fairness and compassion, and of course his signature value, kindness.”

 

“It always helps to have people we love beside us when we have to do difficult things in life.”

 

“What a difference one person can make in the life of another. It’s almost as if he had said, ‘I like you just the way you are.”

 

“In a speech given at an academic conference at Yale University in 1972, Fred Rogers said, “The impact of television must be considered in the light of the possibility that children are exposed to experiences which may be far beyond what their egos can deal with effectively. Those of us who produce television must assume the responsibility for providing images of trustworthy available adults who will modulate these experiences and attempt to keep them within manageable limits.” Which is exactly what Rogers himself had tried to do with the production of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

 

“For his part, Fred McFeely always made sure his grandson knew, directly and sincerely, how much he enjoyed his company. “Freddy, you make my day very special,” McFeely frequently told the shy little boy, reminding him of his importance to the adults in his life.”

 

“The real issue in life is not how many blessings we have, but what we do with our blessings. Some people have many blessings and hoard them. Some have few and give everything away.”

 

“There are, essentially, two compelling reasons why I believe the reading public should care about Fred and his work: First, he recognized the critical importance of learning during the earliest years. No one better understood how essential it is for proper social, emotional, cognitive, and language development to take place in the first few years of life. And no one did more to convince a mass audience in America of the value of early education. Second, he provided, and continues to provide, exemplary moral leadership. Fred Rogers advanced humanistic values because of his belief in Christianity, but his spirituality was completely eclectic; he found merit in all faiths and philosophies. His signature value was human kindness; he lived it and he preached it, to children, to their parents, to their teachers, to all of us everywhere who could take the time to listen.”

 

“Every original and innovator doesn’t have to have psychedelic hair. There’s a cliché version of who’s an original. It’s always somebody making a lot of noise, and being disruptive of some status quo. His originality spoke for itself.” 

My Take

The mark of a good biography or memoir is after you finish reading it, you feel like you have a deep understanding of the person who is a subject.  This is definitely the case of The Good Neighbor.   Author Maxwell King does a superlative job of conveying not just the biographical facts of Fred Rogers’ life (which are interesting in and of themselves, e.g. he hated Dartmouth and transferred away from there as soon he could), but essence of the man himself.  You leave the book understanding what made Mr. Rogers tick and with a lot of respect and admiration for the life he lived.

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325. Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Kay Lynn Hartman

Author:   Dani Shapiro

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir

272 pages, published January 15, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Inheritance, serial memoirist Dani Shapiro writes about her discovery (through an over the counter genetic test that she took on a lark) that the man she thought was her biological father was not.  Shapiro takes the reader with her as she pieces together the hidden story of her own life and discovers new insights about her past and present identity.

Quotes 

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”

 

“It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life—even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine—and still not know the truth of oneself.”

 

“There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.”

 

“Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?”

 

“The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.”

 

“What do we inherit, and how, and why? The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens – that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube – formed me? I did not come from the line of small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands. The imprint of pogroms, of the difficulties and sorrows of immigrant life was not mine – at least not in the physical sense. But I had carried these things a long way in my heart. I was of that dusty and doomed Polish village – and I was not. What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood? I was made of three people: my mother, my father, Ben Walden. Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life.”

 

“After listening to my entire story, he quietly said: “You can say, “This is impossible, terrible.’ Or you can say, ‘This is beautiful, wonderful.’ You can imagine that you’re in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home.” 

My Take

Inheritance is a book that really grew on me and that is in no small part due to the quality of the writing.  When I first started it, I found the author Dani Shapiro to be a bit overwrought in response to discovering that her biological father was a sperm donor.  However, as I got deeper into the book, I was able to relate more to her identity crisis.  I was also able to her speak at a Boulder Book Store author event and found her to be eloquent, empathetic and very moving.

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316. The Silent Wife

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   A.S.A. Harrison

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense

326 pages, published June 25, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Silent Wife is a psychological thriller about a marriage that is at risk and how far one woman will go to keep what she believes to be rightfully hers.

Quotes 

“Life has a way of taking its toll on the person you thought you were.”

 

“Other people are not here to fulfill our needs or meet our expectations, nor will they always treat us well. Failure to accept this will generate feelings of anger and resentment. Peace of mind comes with taking people as they are and emphasizing the positive.”

 

“In asserting that people don’t change, what she means is that they don’t change for the better. Whereas changing for the worse, that goes without saying.”

 

“She didn’t know then that life has a way of backing you into a corner. You make your choices when you’re far too young to understand their implications, and with each choice you make the field of possibility narrows. You choose a career and other careers are lost to you. You choose a mate and commit to loving no other.”

 

“Basic personality traits develop early in life and over time become inviolable, hardwired. Most people learn little from experience, rarely thinking of adjusting their behavior, see problems as emanating from those around them, and keep on doing what they do in spite of everything, for better or worse.”

 

“We live alone in our cluttered psyches, possessed by our entrenched beliefs, our fatuous desires, our endless contradictions – and like it or not we have to put up with this in one another.  Do you want your man to be a man or do you want to turn him into a pussy? Don’t think you can have it both ways.”

 

“You will not be the same person coming out of a relationship as you were going into it.”

 

“Even if you forget that´s not the same as if it never happened. The slate is not entirely wiped clean; you can´t reclaim the person you were beforehand; your state of innocence is not there to be retrieved.”

 

“It’s money not education that’s the holy grail in America.”

 

“The woman who refuses to object, who doesn’t yell and scream—there’s strength in that, and power. The way she overrides sentiment, won’t enter into blaming or bickering, never gives him an opening, doesn’t allow him to turn it back on her. She knows that her refusal leaves him alone with his choices.”

 

“Acceptance is supposed to be a good thing – Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Also compromise, as every couples therapist will tell you. But the cost was high – the damping of expectation, the dwindling of spirit, the resignation that comes to replace enthusiasm, the cynicism that supplants hope. The mouldering that goes unnoticed and unchecked.”

 

“Time hangs suspended, and yet it’s about to end. Death should be a seduction, not a rape. Given one more minute he could do so much. Even the guilty are allowed to make a phone call, send a message. How alive he feels, how brightly he shines, like a lit fuse, a firecracker about to go off. What he wouldn’t give for a minute more, just one ordinary minute tacked crudely onto the end of his life.”

 

“As for herself, every morning on waking she gives thanks to the God she doesn’t disbelieve in. Although she can’t credit him with saving her, she needs this outlet for her gratitude.” 

My Take

Much in the same vein as Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, The Silent Wife was a page turner that I couldn’t put down.  Interesting insights into a long term marriage on the rocks, with some twists and turns that kept me engaged.  Great vacation read.

 

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314. The Nix

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Nancy Sissom

Author:   Nathan Hill

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

640 pages, published August 30, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Nix is a wide ranging, humorous novel about a son, the mother who left him as a child, and how his search to uncover the secrets of her life leads him to understand his own.

Quotes 

“Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.”

 

“if you make the easy choice every day, then it becomes a pattern, and your patterns become your life.”

 

“The flip side of being a person who never fails at anything is that you never do anything you could fail at. You never do anything risky. There’s a certain essential lack of courage among people who seem to be good at everything.”

 

“The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.”        

 

“What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.”

 

“Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.”

 

“about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you’re twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don’t know what your small true part is until much later.”

 

“That, paradoxically, narrowing her concerns had made her more capable of love and generosity and empathy and, yes, even peace and justice. It was the difference between loving something out of duty—because the movement required it of you—and loving something you actually loved. Love—real, genuine, unasked-for love—made room for more of itself, it turned out. Love, when freely given, duplicates and multiplies.”

 

“Think about it. Why does one eat a snack? Why is a snack necessary? The answer—and we’ve done a million studies on this—is because our lives are filled with tedium and drudgery and endless toil and we need a tiny blip of pleasure to repel the gathering darkness. Thus, we give ourselves a treat. “But here’s the thing,” Periwinkle continues, his eyes all aglow, “even the things we do to break the routine become routine. Even the things we do to escape the sadness of our lives have themselves become sad. What this ad acknowledges is that you’ve been eating all these snacks and yet you are not happy, and you’ve been watching all these shows and yet you still feel lonely, and you’ve been seeing all this news and yet the world makes no sense, and you’ve been playing all these games and yet the melancholy sinks deeper and deeper into you. How do you escape?” “You buy a new chip.” “You buy a missile-shaped chip! That’s the answer. What this ad does is admit something you already deeply suspect and existentially fear: that consumerism is a failure and you will never find any meaning there no matter how much money you spend. So the great challenge for people like me is to convince people like you that the problem is not systemic. It’s not that snacks leave you feeling empty, it’s that you haven’t found the right snack yet. It’s not that TV turns out to be a poor substitute for human connection, it’s that you haven’t found the right show yet. It’s not that politics are hopelessly bankrupt, it’s that you haven’t found the right politician yet. And this ad just comes right out and says it. I swear to god it’s like playing poker against someone who’s showing his cards and yet still bluffing by force of personality.”

 

“And come to think of it, maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly at your desk and surf the internet and not go insane.”

 

“It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.”

 

“We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false.”

 

“Blaming his students for being uninspired was so much easier than doing the work required to inspire them.”

 

“Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.”

 

“Any problem you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That’s it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.”

 

“You have to be careful,” Pwnage said, “with people who are puzzles and people who are traps. A puzzle can be solved but a trap cannot. Usually what happens is you think someone’s a puzzle until you realize they’re a trap. But by then it’s too late. That’s the trap.”

 

“But you cannot endure this world alone, and the more Samuel’s written his book, the more he’s realized how wrong he was. Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar.”

 

“Eventually, all debts must be repaid.”

 

“Steak and chicken have too much baggage these days. Was it free-range? Antibiotic-free? Cruelty-free? Organic? Kosher? Did the farmer wear silken gloves to caress it to sleep every night while singing gentle lullabies? You can’t order a fucking hamburger anymore without embracing some kind of political platform.”

 

“In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what’s usually ignored is the fact that each man’s description was correct. What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind—it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp.” 

My Take

While The Nix is a long book, I was engrossed throughout and thoroughly enjoyed all of the characters and author Nathan Hill’s commentary on the times we live in.  I found the metaphors he used around video games to be particularly inspired.  I also highly recommend the Audiobook which had great narration.

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